Recalled by some as an iron-fisted dictator, and by others as the embodiment of military efficiency and political authority, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who has died aged 87 after a heart attack in Madrid, ruled Venezuela from 1952 to 1958.

His overthrow led to the establishment of the 40-year experiment in two-party democracy known as the Punto Fijo pact, whose eventual collapse in a morass of corruption and economic mismanagement went some way towards reviving, in the late 1990s, the image of the strongman it had replaced.

It was not far enough, however, to erase the memory of the Seguridad Nacional, the fearsome secret police force responsible for torturing many opposition figures who were later to become leading lights of the Punto Fijo era.

Like so many of Venezuela's caudillos, Perez was an andino (Andean), born in the mountainous west of the country, in the town of Michelena. He began his military career at 17, and graduated from the Escuela Militar in 1934 with the rank of second lieutenant.

After attending courses at the Chorillos military academy in Peru from 1939-40, he was promoted to captain the following year. Simultaneously, and with commendable foresight, he cultivated a friendship with the future Peruvian dictator, Manuel Odría.

Although responsible for infantry and artillery weapons training at the Escuela Militar, Perez's career was that of a military bureaucrat, specialising in public administration. The coup of October 18 1945 - dubbed the "October revolution" by the then-revolutionary Acción Democrática party (AD) - was his baptism of fire.

Pérez conspired with the AD against the government of General Isaías Medina Angarita, and was rewarded with the post of army chief of staff and the rank of major.

On November 24 1948, came his second coup - this time against President Róm- ulo Gallegos, whom certain sectors of the armed forces held to be excessively close to the AD leader Rómulo Betancourt.

Among the earliest decrees of the new military junta was the dissolution of the AD on the grounds that it had "sought to subvert the institutional essence of the armed forces by turning them into the instrument of its designs". Secrecy and persecution would henceforth be the fate of the adecos , as AD members are known.

Though a member of the junta, however, Pérez did not become its president. Even after the 1950 assassination of junta leader Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, he clung to the post of defence minister, concerned to protect himself against those who saw his hand in the murder.

Delgado's crime was to have proposed a gradual return to democracy, and his assass- ination resolved the argument in favour of those who sought the consolidation of Pérez's own leadership.Temporarily, a civilian, Germán Suárez Flamerich, was named as Delgado's replacement, but this was merely a convenient cover for Pérez's transition to undisputed strongman.

This was the era of the great dictator in Latin America. Juan Domingo Perón ruled in Argentina, Manuel Odría in Peru, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dom- inican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Many of these would later pay visits to General Pérez, as he now became. Perón was a guest for many years.

In 1952, after two years in the shadows, Pérez assumed the provisional presidency of Venez- uela, after the junta had refused to recognise the results of that year's general elections. Finally, on April 19 1953, he achieved his ambition, and was sworn in as president of the republic, following an election by a constituent assembly.

He was 39 years old. He enjoyed parties, vermouth cocktails and the company of cabaret stars. Some called him weak and indecisive, arguing that his closest collaborators were the ones who really ran the country. Others said the opposite was true.

Censorship, political persecution, torture and assassination were blended with authoritarian efficiency and a flourishing public works programme in the dictator's New National Ideal. Between 1953 and 1957, Perez's government constructed lasting monuments unequalled under the democratic regime that followed his demise - the Central University (UCV) campus, the Francisco Faj-ardo and Caracas-La Guaira motorways, the Guayana steelworks and the Morón petrochemical complex.

Simultaneously, the secret police were hunting down all those considered a threat to "national security", as they defined it. On their barracks walls were mugshots of Rómulo Betancourt, Jaime Lusinchi and Luis Herrera Campins - all of them later elected to the presidency of the republic. The ranks of Venezuelan political exiles swelled in countries as far apart as Bolivia and the Soviet Union, though even at those distances dissidents were far from safe.

Betancourt, the general's most fervent opponent, was the subject of an assassina tion attempt in Puerto Rico, while another future president, Carlos Andrés Pérez, almost became the victim of a Colombian-Venezuelan agreement, under which enemies of either government became enemies of both.

Washington maintained a cosy relationship with the Pérez dictatorship, whom President Eisenhower went so far as to decorate. Indeed, the US military attaché had been present in the Miraflores barracks when Rómulo Gallegos was overthrown in 1948. The romance came to an end, however, when Pérez had the temerity to begin developing a national industrial base, rather than simply absorbing US capital at high rates of interest.

In 1957, Acción Democrát-ica, the Christian Democratic party Copei, the Democratic Revolutionary Union (URD) and the communists (PCV) came together in the Junta Patriótica to block Pérez's bid for re-election. That same year, Chile and Argentina broke off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, the latter on account of Pérez's refusal to extradite Perón.

Ignoring his increasingly united opponents, the general went ahead with the plebiscite designed to perpetuate his rule. But students and workers took to the streets in a month-long protest and, two days before the December 15 plebiscite, the Junta Patriótica called a general strike.

The new year began with a military insurrection in Maracay and Caracas, and, although it was swiftly crushed, the writing was clearly on the wall. On January 4, the Junta Patriótica published a manifesto entitled The People And The Army United Against The Usurper. Pérez decided to take direct control of the defence ministry.

The opposition, however, declined to be intimidated, and a newspaper workers' strike that began on January 21 1958 turned into a second general strike. The government introduced a curfew, but, on January 23, the armed forces joined the popular movement to oust the dictator.

Pérez fled the country with his wife and children, leaving behind a suitcase containing property titles and certificates worth $300m. Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal, who had joined the rebellion at the last minute, became head of the military junta that ushered in the new democracy.

After taking refuge in the United States, Pérez was extradited to Venezuela in 1963, and sentenced to four years in jail for corruption. On his release, he left for exile in Spain, never to return, despite invitations from both Presidents Rafael Caldera and - more recently - Hugo Chávez, who included the general on the guest list for his 1999 inauguration, apparently as a means of symbolising the death of Punto Fijo.

In Madrid, the passing decades turned Pérez from hated dictator into wise elder statesman. He swapped his general's uniform for a business suit and became an investor in tourist projects.

An exception, perhaps, to the dictum of Andrés Eloy Blanco, a Venezuelan poet who died in exile, pursued by the Seguridad Nacional: "The good sons of Venezuela die abroad, while the bad sons live on for ever at home."

 Marcos Pérez Jiménez, soldier and politician, born April 25 1914; died September 20 2001